Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
Abstract
Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be -- to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose what questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more -- about everything -- reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
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Technology is not neutral, but rather shaped by the values, experiences, knowledge, and positionalities of its developers.
“this scholarship emphasizes that technology is not neutral, but rather shaped by the values, experiences, knowledge, and positionalities of its developers.”
From Reimagining Open Source and Openness in AI: Co-Creating Responsible Technological Futures (2026) · cites this paper as [23]
An established body of work has long called for envisioning alternative technological futures, particularly those grounded in diverse social and cultural perspectives.
“An established body of work has long called for envisioning alternative technological futures, particularly those grounded in diverse social and cultural perspectives [20, 23, 27, 28].”
From Reimagining Open Source and Openness in AI: Co-Creating Responsible Technological Futures (2026) · cites this paper as [23]
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- Venue
- Choice Reviews Online
- Publisher
- American Library Association
- Published
- 2014-05-22
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 51-5390-51-5390
- ISSN
- 0009-4978 (ISSN-L)
- 1523-8253
- OpenAlex
- W219375404
- Cited by
- 1,952
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 216 · 2024: 270 · 2023: 284 · 2022: 280 · 2021: 196 · 2020: 187 · 2019: 158 · 2018: 121 · 2017: 82 · 2016: 94 · 2015: 38 · 2014: 23 · 2013: 1
- Type
- book review
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Choice Reviews Online (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Mechanical Engineering › Design Education and Practice
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Building and Construction › Sustainable Design and Development
- Keywords
- speculative design, design fiction, social dreaming, futures studies, speculative futures, philosophy of technology, political theory, speculative technology
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